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Changing Perceptions examines the revived interest in landscape by contemporary artists, demonstrating the power of the land to speak to the imagination.

Recent works in painting, photography, printmaking, and even sculpture trace the evolving image of the landscape in art of the last 40 years. Many contemporary landscape artists explore the way that humanity has laid its hands on the land. Fences, dams, highways, and billboards appear as an acknowledgement that pristine wilderness is a rarity, foreign to most peoples' experience.

Now that humans have gotten their dirty paws on everything, pristine wilderness is more an idea than a reality. At the Albuquerque Museum (2000 Mountain NW) this weekend, a new exhibition called Changing Perceptions of the Western Landscape acknowledges the truth: that highways, vehicles, billboards and fences are pretty much inseparable from our experience of the wild world. In Erika Osborne's oil on linen work “Looking for Moran,” for example, the Grand Canyon unfurls itself in all its unutterable richness, illuminated by beams of sunlight that pierce the stygian cloud cover, but the grandeur is bounded in the foreground by a cluster of decidedly unglorious tour buses. The exhibition's other artists include Gus Foster, Woody Gwyn, Amelia Bauer, Wes Hempel, Joanne Lefrak, Jack Loeffler, Patrick Nagatani, Donald Woodman, Ed Ruscha, Mary Tsiongas and Vincent Valdez. The exhibition opens Saturday, May 18, and runs until Sept. 21. Hours and admission costs vary, so see cabq.gov for more information.